The subarctic is dominated by the taiga, or boreal forest, an ecosystem of coniferous forest and large marshes. Subarctic peoples traditionally used a variety of technologies to cope with the cold northern winters and were adept in the production of well-insulated homes, fur garments, toboggans, ice chisels, and snowshoes. The traditional diet included game animals such as moose, caribou, bison (in the southern locales), beaver, and fish, as well as wild plant foods such as berries, roots, and sap. Food resources were distributed quite thinly over the subarctic landscape, and starvation was always a potential problem.

Taiga (boreal forest), with white spruce, birch, and low shrubs, near the Fortymile River, a …

By the 1600s European fur traders had recognized that the taiga provided an optimal climate for the production of dense pelts. These traders decisively influenced the region’s indigenous peoples, as did Christian missionaries. The fur trade had an especially strong impact on traditional economies, as time spent trapping furs could not be spent on direct subsistence activities; this caused a rather rapid increase in the use of purchased food items such as flour and sugar, which were substituted for wild fare. Despite much pressure to change, however, the relative isolation of the region has facilitated the persistence of many traditional beliefs, hunting customs, kinship relations, and the like (seeNative American: History).

The American Subarctic culture area contains two relatively distinct zones. The Eastern Subarctic is inhabited by speakers of Algonquian languages, including the Innu (formerly Montagnais and Naskapi; seeSidebar: Native American Self-Names) of northern Quebec, the Cree, and several groups of Ojibwa who, after the beginning of the fur trade, displaced the Cree from what are now west-central Ontario and eastern Manitoba. The Western Subarctic is largely home to Athabaskan speakers, whose territories extend from Canada into Alaska. Cultural differences among the Athabaskans justify the delineation of the Western Subarctic into two subareas. The first, drained mostly by the northward-flowing Mackenzie River system, is inhabited by the Chipewyan, Beaver, Slave, and Kaska nations. Their cultures were generally more mobile and less socially stratified than that of the second subarea, where salmon streams that drain into the Pacific Ocean provide a reliable food resource and natural gathering places. Its groups include the Carrier, part of the Gwich’in (Kutchin), the Tanaina, and the Deg Xinag (Ingalik).

Northward the Algonquians and Athabaskans border on the Inuit (Canadian Eskimo). To the west the Canadian Athabaskans encounter the Tlingit, Tsimshian, and other Northwest Coast Indians, while the Alaskan groups abut Yupik/Yupiit (American Eskimo) lands.

Traditional culture patterns

Ethos

Given the difficult environmental conditions of the region, it is perhaps not surprising that most of its cultures traditionally placed a high value on personal autonomy and responsibility, conceived of the world as a generally dangerous place, and emphasized concrete, current realities rather than future possibilities. In anticipation of potential scarcity, Subarctic cultural concepts included not only personal competence but also an acknowledgement of the individual’s need to rely upon others and to place the well-being of the group ahead of personal gain.

Many Subarctic cultures cultivated personality traits such as reticence, emotionally undemonstrative interaction styles, deference to others, strong individual control of aggressive impulses, and the ability to bear up stoically to deprivation. Although hostility was not absent from traditional culture, most groups preferred that it be only indirectly revealed through such outlets as sorcery or gossip. Subarctic individuals’ ease with long silences and preference for subdued emotional responses have sometimes been a source of cross-cultural misunderstanding with individuals from outside the region, who are often less taciturn.

Before contact with Europeans, the Subarctic peoples were subsistence hunters and gatherers. Although their specific economic strategies and technologies were highly adapted to the northern environment, many of their other cultural practices were typical of traditional hunting and gathering cultures worldwide. Most northern societies were organized around nuclear, or sometimes three-generation, families. The next level of social organization, the band, comprised a few related couples, their dependent children, and their dependent elders; bands generally included no more than 20 to 30 individuals, who lived, hunted, and traveled together (seeSidebar: The Difference Between a Tribe and a Band).

Although Eastern Subarctic peoples traditionally identified with a particular geographic territory, they generally chose not to organize politically beyond the level of the band; instead, they identified themselves as members of the same tribe or nation based on linguistic and kinship affinities they shared with neighbouring bands. Seasonal gatherings of several bands often occurred at good fishing lakes or near rich hunting grounds for periods that were as intensely sociable as they were abundantly provided with fish or game. The fur trade period created a new type of territorial group among these peoples, known as the home guard or trading-post band, usually named for the settlement in which its members traded. These new groups amalgamated the smaller bands and notably expanded the population in which marriage occurred.

In the Pacific drainage area, sedentary villages were the preferred form of geopolitical organization, each with an associated territory for hunting and gathering. On the lower Yukon and upper Kuskokwim rivers, Deg Xinag village life centred on the kashim, or men’s house, where a council of male elders met to hear disputes and where elaborate seasonal ceremonies were performed.

Whether organized in bands or villages, individual leadership and authority derived primarily from the combination of eloquence, wisdom, experience, healing or magical power, generosity, and a capacity for hard work.

In pursuit of a livelihood, families and local bands shifted their location as the seasons changed. In northwest Canada, groups scattered in early winter to hunt caribou in the mountains; elsewhere, autumn drew people to the shorelines of lakes and bays where large numbers of ducks and geese could be taken for the winter larder. At other times people gathered around lakes to fish. In late winter the Deg Xinag quit their villages and headed for spring camps, as much for a change of scenery as for the good fishing.

As dependence on fur trapping became heavier, the Cree, Slave, Kaska, and many other groups developed a two-part annual cycle. In winter the family lived on its trapline. In summer the family brought its furs to the trading post and camped there until fall, enjoying abundant social interaction. The warm months with their long daylight became a time for visiting and often included dances (often to fiddle music), marriages, and appearances by the region’s Anglican or Roman Catholic bishop.

Despite much movement, shelters were not always portable. The Deg Xinag spent winters in houses excavated in the soil, roofed with beams and poles, hung with mats, and provided with an entry. Other groups, such as the Cree and Ojibwa, built conical winter lodges durably roofed with boughs, earth, and snow. On the trail, however, people put up skin or brush shelters, simple lean-tos, or camped in the open facing a fire.

Production and technology

Everywhere in the Subarctic a large and varied set of weapons, traps, and other ingenious appliances played a vital role in traditional subsistence activities. Important devices included the bow and arrow, with stone or bone tips for different kinds of game; lances; the spear-thrower (or atlatl) and spear; weirs and basket traps for fish; nets of willow bark and of other substances; snares for small game such as rabbits; deadfalls (traps with logs or other weights that fall on game and kill them); pit traps; and decoys for birds. Vehicles were also vital, as people depended heavily on mobility for survival; these included bark canoes, hardwood toboggans, and travel aids such as large sinew-netted snowshoes to run down big game, a smaller variety to break trail for the toboggan, and snow goggles to use against the glare of the spring sun.

Because dog teams require large quantities of meat, they were not kept to pull toboggans until the fur trade period, when people began to supplement their diets with European staples; after that point, dog teams became increasingly important in transporting furs to market. An idea of the extent to which people depended on game and of the labour involved in obtaining adequate amounts of food can be gained from food-consumption figures obtained in the mid-20th century. In the relatively poor country west of James Bay, 400 Cree men, women, and children in the course of a fall, winter, and spring (nine months) consumed about 128,000 pounds (58,000 kg) of meat and fish in addition to staples from the store, especially flour, lard, and sugar.

Driver and dog team crossing the Great Slave Lake, N.W.T., Can.

Gordon Wiltsie/AlpenImage, Ltd.

Subarctic peoples augmented their technical resourcefulness and skill in hunting with magic and divination. A noteworthy form of divination used in locating game required heating a large animal’s shoulder blade over fire until it cracked. Hunters then went in the direction of the crack. The random element in the method increased the chances that they would go to a fresh, relatively undisturbed piece of ground.

Across the Subarctic, people preserved meat by drying and pounding it together with fat and berries to make pemmican. The Pacific-drainage Athabaskans also preserved salmon by smoking. Other widely distributed technical skills included complicated chemical processes, as in using animal brains or human urine to tan caribou and moose skins; these were then sewn into garments with the help of bone needles and animal sinew. Women also plaited rabbit skins into ropes and wove roots to form watertight baskets.

Property and social stratification

In traditional Subarctic cultures, land and water, the sources of food, were not considered to be either individual or group property, yet nobody would usurp the privilege of a group that was currently exploiting a berry patch, beaver creek, or hunting range. Clothing, the contents of food caches, and other portable goods were recognized as having individual owners. When in need, a group could borrow from another’s food cache, provided the food was replaced and the owners told of the act as soon as possible. Legally inalienable family trapping territories came into being with the fur trade and in many places have been registered by the federal or dominion government. Sharing game was always important economically, while gifts other than food were bestowed primarily for ceremonial purposes.

Although social stratification was not customary across the entire Subarctic, the Deg Xinag informally recognized three classes of families. Usually at least three-quarters of a Deg Xinag village comprised common people. Rich families, which accumulated surplus food thanks to members’ industry or superior hunting and fishing abilities, constituted about 5 percent of the community. They took the lead in the community’s ceremonial life. The rest of the people did little and lived off the others; consequently, they enjoyed so little respect that they had a hard time finding spouses.

Family and kinship relations

Within the local band, the two- or three-generation family of husband, wife, children—frequently including adopted children—and (in some cases) dependent elders constituted the traditional unit of economic activity and emotional security. The intense importance of the family, especially during childhood, is revealed in folklore about the unhappy lot of cruelly treated orphans; children with neither parents nor grandparents suffered the worst.

Kinship in the Subarctic traditionally included some categories that are common in traditional cultures but less commonly observed in the 21st century. Parallel cousins, the children of one’s mother’s sisters or father’s brothers, were usually called by the same kinship term as one’s siblings and treated as such. In contrast, cross-cousins, the children of one’s father’s sisters or mother’s brothers, were often seen as the best pool from which to draw a mate. Northern peoples held strong prohibitions against incest, which was traditionally defined as sexual contact between siblings (including parallel cousins), between parents and children, and between adjacent generations of in-laws (e.g., mothers-in-law and sons-in-law, fathers-in-law and daughters-in-law).

Kin relations among Subarctic peoples often involved a sort of emotional division of labour: supportive, teasing, or joking relationships occurred with one group of relatives, while authoritative, circumspect, or avoidance relationships were the norm with another group of kin. In many cases, and probably in support of the incest prohibition, the appropriate form of interaction was based on generational proximity: grandparents and grandchildren would tease, joke, hug, and cuddle, while interaction between adjacent generations (parent-child, sibling-sibling, parents-in-law and children-in-law) would be more reserved. In other cases the relationships were based on lineage; casual interactions tended to be more common with relatives from the mother’s line and avoidance relations more common with those from the father’s line. Some groups combined both generational and lineal forms.

In following these customs, siblings of the opposite sex who had reached puberty generally conducted themselves circumspectly in each other’s presence and even tended to practice polite avoidance, as did fathers and their grown daughters. Ceremonial avoidance also governed the relationship of a man and his mother-in-law, contrasting with the camaraderie linking brothers-in-law, which was one of the warmest of all relationships between grown men. Among the Kaska, for instance, a group that could joke freely, and even engage in sexual ribaldry, comprised a woman, her husband’s brother, and her sister’s husband (or alternatively, a man, his wife’s sister, and his brother’s wife).

Marriages in the Subarctic were traditionally founded upon an agreement between the parents of a potential bride and groom; the preferences of those to wed were taken into account, but obedience to parental choices was expected. The value placed on both women’s and men’s contributions in the difficult environment meant that a marriage usually entailed one of two kinds of social and economic exchange. Most typically, the groom would provide services to the bride’s family for a period of time; the couple’s residence with the wife’s family provided emotional support as well as time to evaluate the husband’s hunting prowess and ensured the wife’s female kin were available to assist her in at least her first pregnancy and childbirth. Less often, two young women would exchange places, with a daughter from each family becoming daughter-in-law to the other family.

Although households were primarily monogamous, some marriages included one husband shared by two wives. This could happen, for example, when a man engaged in the levirate, a custom in which he espoused his dead brother’s widow and took on the responsibility of providing for her and her children.

Socialization of children

Traditional Subarctic cultures included a variety of pregnancy taboos and postnatal observances to ensure the well-being of mother and child. Birth took place at home, in a special birth structure or, according to early travelers among neighbouring Mi’kmaq, in the woods. One or more knowledgeable women assisted the mother in giving birth and in caring for the delivered child. Swaddled babies were diapered with moss and carried on the mother’s back in an ornamented skin bag or a cradleboard.

Family members and other relatives played the major role in the informal process of childhood education. A child had considerable scope to learn through copying others. Thus, a Kaska parent might say “Make tea!” and a small girl would try to reconstruct what she had often observed her mother and older sisters doing but what she had never been formally instructed to do. Parents did not neglect disciplining and even chastising a disobedient child for such offenses as stealing and rebelliousness. More important for the formation of personalities is the fact that parental treatment subtly but firmly encouraged children to become independent and self-reliant.

Several “firsts,” including the first tooth, the first game killed by a boy, and a girl’s first menstruation (menarche), were ceremonially recognized, sometimes by a small feast. Menarche was recognized by an elaborate series of ritual observances that were undertaken to protect the girl and her family from the powerful forces that were effecting the changes in her body. Athabaskan peoples paid the greatest ritual attention to menarche, with Gwich’in girls moving to a special shelter constructed some distance from the family camp and staying there for up to a year. At the menarche camp a girl wore a pointed hood that caused her to look down toward the ground. Other ceremonial precautions included a rattle of bone that was supposed to prevent her from hearing anything, a special stick to use if she wanted to scratch her head, and a special cup that should not touch her lips. Subsequent menstruation involved only a short period of seclusion.

Religious beliefs

Subarctic peoples traditionally had a highly individualistic relationship with the supernatural: most men and women undertook a vision quest in their youth and relied heavily upon one or more guardian spirits for protection and guidance. In Kaska terms the vision occurred by “dreaming of animals in a lonely place” or hearing “somebody sing,” perhaps a moose in the guise of a person. Dreams notified an individual of impending events and might advise one how to behave in order to achieve success or avoid misfortune.

Among many Subarctic peoples there was a widespread belief that hunting success depended upon treating prey animals and their remains with reverence. This involved various practices such as disposing of the animals’ bones carefully so that dogs could not chew them. Respect was particularly evident in the use of polite circumlocutions to refer to bears. Many groups undertook several ceremonial observances in bear hunting, including a purifying sweat bath before departing on the hunt and an offer of tobacco to a bear that had been killed. Afterward the people feasted and danced in its honour.

Two important concepts of the Innu and other Algonquian groups were manitou and the “big man” (a concept quite different from the “big men” of Melanesian cultures, who are local leaders). Manitou represents a pervasive power in the world that individuals can learn to use on their own behalf. The term Great Manitou, designating a personal god, probably represents a missionary-inspired adaptation of an older idea. A person’s big man is an intimate spirit-being who confers wisdom, competence, skill, and strength in the food quest as well as in other areas of life, including magic. Maintaining a relationship with this being requires ethically good conduct. Animal-spirit “bosses” who control the supply of caribou, fish, and other creatures are another traditional belief shared by Algonquian and certain Athabaskan groups.

Three of the most popular characters in Algonquian folklore are Wiitiko (Windigo), a terrifying cannibalistic giant apt to be encountered in the forest; Tcikapis, a kindly, powerful young hero and the subject of many myths; and Wiskijan (Whiskeyjack), an amusing trickster (seetrickster tale). “Wiitiko psychosis” refers to a condition in which an individual would be seized by the obsessive idea that he was turning into a cannibal with a compulsive craving for human flesh.

Shamanism was an important feature of traditional Subarctic culture. The shaman, who could be male or female, served as a specialist curer and diviner in addition to his or her routine adult responsibilities. It was thought that occasionally shamans became evil and behaved malignantly. Shamanistic ability came to an individual from dreaming of animals who taught the dreamer to work with their aid; such ability had to be validated through successful performance.

The Deg Xinag conceived of humans as comprising body, soul, and “speech,” the latter an element surviving after death but, unlike the soul, not reincarnated. Hazards to life came from the soul always being menaced by various supernatural figures that were the primary enemies of human survival and by the souls of powerful evil shamans acting on behalf of these supernatural figures (seesoul loss). In contrast, spirit-beings associated with animals and berries supported human survival. Animal songs and amulets created good relations with helpful animal spirits; elaborate ceremonies in the men’s house, to which the spirit-beings were invited, protected the food supply.

Cultural continuity and change

By the late 19th century, Canada and the United States had established their dominance over all American Subarctic peoples. In contrast to many European colonial powers, which often promoted racial segregation, the United States and Canada promoted Indianassimilation, a policy that attempted to replace indigenous lifeways with those of the dominant culture. Both countries used mechanisms such as compulsory education at boarding schools and the elimination of separate legal status for aboriginal peoples to implement their assimilationist goals (seeNative American: History).

During the 20th century Subarctic peoples encountered profound local economic changes in addition to assimilationist policies. Well into the first third of the century, the northern subsistence economy continued to depend heavily upon hunting, while the cash economy derived almost entirely from the fur trade. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, demand for pelts drastically decreased, decimating the region’s cash economy; following World War II, new governmental restrictions on subsistence hunting and on trapping slowed economic recovery. In response to the increasing need for wage-based income, many indigenous families relocated from the forests and trading centres to established northern cities such as Fairbanks (Alaska), Whitehorse (Yukon), and Churchill (Manitoba), as well as to new towns, such as Schefferville (Quebec), Yellowknife (Northwest Territories), and Inuvik (Northwest Territories). These towns offered employment in industries such as commercial fishing, construction, mining, and defense. Expanding economic opportunities in the north also drew families from southern Canada, and for the first time fairly large numbers of indigenous Subarctic peoples and Euro-Americans interacted.

Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories (Can.), was founded in 1935 on the north …

George Hunter

By the close of the 20th century, many Subarctic peoples had become involved in cultural preservation or revitalization movements, and a portion of those chose to remain in or relocate to smaller trading-post settlements to foster a more traditional lifestyle. Whether in rural or urban areas, many First Nations peoples and Native Alaskans began to view an intact forest landscape as an intrinsic part of their heritage. They became increasingly concerned about the economic development of the north and used a variety of means, from protest through land claims and other legal actions, to prevent or ameliorate the effects of such development. Many of their efforts have proven successful, most notably those resulting in the Alaskan Native Claim Settlement Act (U.S., 1971) and associated legislation and the creation of Nunavut (Canada, 1999), a province with a predominantly aboriginal government. See alsoNative American: Developments in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Britannica Web sites

In Native American studies, the culture area south of the Arctic is called the Subarctic. It includes most of what are now Alaska and Canada (excluding the Maritime Provinces-New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island-which are part of the Northeast culture area). Subarctic peoples from Alaska are often collectively referred to as Native Alaskans, while in Canada they are known as First Nations peoples. Although some Eskimo (Inuit and Yupik) peoples also live in the Subarctic culture area, they are generally grouped with Arctic peoples.

Article Contributors

Article History

Feedback

Corrections? Updates? Help us improve this article!Contact our editors with your feedback.